In terms of weighting each state’s two Senate seats? That might be workable, too, although the small-population states will resist that more than they eill the Senate voting with the House.
Either way, as long as two seats per state to be kept in the Senate, any change will have a better chance of passing a Constitutional challenge. That’s the only plausible path to reform.
That’s an interesting approach to hoist the conservatives by their own petards. I doubt it would pass, but it would be a good trolley on them.
Conservatives would never allow it to happen that way. A more likely “three Californias” scenario would be two liberal states and one conservative one (probably the Central Valley and the northeast and northernmost portions of the state), making it a wash at best in the Senate while hurting liberal Californians in other ways.
As Cory noted, California progressives would face serious economic challenges if the state as a whole left the Union, as would the rest of the U.S. This is why one of Calexit’s biggest real-world sponsors has been Moscow.
It’s not California’s job to shoot itself in the foot to solve this problem for conservatives, which is ultimately one of their own making. Most young people and college-educated* people and large multinational employers just don’t see a lot of value or appeal in bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, and Xtianism.
Conservatives, and liberals, at the Federal level, won’t allow this to happen because once you start re-drawing state lines, no one can say how far that will go. They could add dozens, hundreds of new states with all kinds of gerrymandering and other schemes. It’s opening Pandoras Box, and would destabilize the entire system.
But anyway…
The official Three Californias proposal, which got kicked off the ballot by the state Supreme Court, would have made two solidly liberal Californias, and one leaning liberal but maybe competitive California. You can see it in the Wikipedia article, it’s pretty clear that two of the new Californias would be deep-blue, non-competitive, and the other would be… blue and maybe a little bit competitive but not really.
The state Supreme Court said that you can’t use a ballot initiative to change the borders of California, so there won’t be any future “split up California” ballot props unless they are started by the legislature and going as a state constitutional amendment. Just impossible to see how that would happen in reality.
Yeah, I think that talking about what “the majority” wants is a case where a bad metric has replaced the thing we ought to be trying to measure. If we want the people to really govern themselves, then rules ought to be made by consensus. But we can’t do that, so we said, “how about most instead of all”? That has very obvious problems, so throw in some stuff about making sure you don’t stomp on the people who disagree.
Democracy, I think, is supposed to be the people collectively governing themselves, not a perpetual low-level civil war between red shirts and blue shirts. Excessive deference to majority rule seems to create a lot of antagonism rather than a spirit of cooperation.
Every thought bubble I’ve seen for the “State of Jefferson” has a fundamental flaw: no economy. Southern Oregon is dependent on taxes from the Willamette Valley; likewise, California north of Sacramento is subsidized by the metropolitan areas of the state. The end result would be a “State” with an economy jealous of post-coal West Virginia.
The official Three Californias proposal was a fantasy, just like any of the other schemes to split up California or Calexit. These proposals are being put forward and funded by “free” market fundies, Nativist bigots, right-wing populists, and the Kremlin. Anyone who thinks any of those groups want to promote liberal democracy or progressive values is naive and fooling themselves.
Lol, I am, but I think it’s the same deal as Star Trek- read him young enough that it wasn’t glaringly obvious, just part of learning about the world in an imaginative way.
I find it interesting that the commentary mostly focuses on, like you say, how these things can be used politically. I think the focus should be on the people who live there, rather than the people who live everywhere else. How could politics be organized to best serve their interests while balancing them with their neighbors? Because wouldn’t you want them to grant you the same courtesy?
The danger I see when politics in the sparsely populated western areas comes up is that they tend to be viewed as these vassal areas, not in control of their own economic interests because the rest of the country administrates a lot of the land and tends to think of them as their backyard recreation at best and just something that gives the environmental warm fuzzies at worst. Like, they rarely if ever would go there, but they just like the idea, never mind the people who live there. There’s an unsavory tendency on the part of urbanites to be perfectly happy to keep rural people poor for the sake of their own tourism desires and dubious environmental trade-offs.
Interesting to hear a bit on NPR last week about how logging is now back on the table after the fire disasters.
I don’t think those are unimportant issues, but given that we’re currently living in a oligopoly of the wealthy, who are tilting the scales to more and more wealth inequality, rule by the majority would be a decided improvement. With the example of Wyoming again, the Congressional delegation (one of whom got the job through, essentially, inheritance from her dad, a famous Dick) support oil companies interests, encourage environmental devastation where it enriches companies, and cut taxes for the uberwealthy. Empowering that crowd is not helping a significant minority, other than the 1%.
